I now have an ARM powered Android phone and for the last two days been playing with a new ipad2 (gone back to owner now)
. . . very tempted to save up my sardine tins to get one . . .

The Android phone (which I use as a computer) reminds me of facebook. Lots to do most of it trivial or useless. Will take me a while to get used to it

Ipad2 . . . Any good?
Yes. Very good. Very polished. Very pleasant.
Totally cloud based - you really need net connection
Fast, quiet, long battery life 5 hour charging - 10 hour usage
The screen is fabulous
The IOS very straight forward interfacing
Safari browser is OK
Youtube works, there is a free BBC iplayer, Street view in Google maps IS available

Problems. No flash - not such a bad thing
No USB - that is a bad thing . . .
The screen keyboard is very good but the screen cover is
separate prop which Apple overcharges for in its normal outrageous manner
That cover would be much more useful
if it was a blue tooth rubberised rollerable keyboard
Don’t tell me no one thought of that?

Will we ever see Puppy on it?
Not in Puppy's present form - it is just not yet 'touch enabled
BUT that might be supported in the latest kernel options?

I am very tempted by the ASUS TF300T. This is a 10 inch display pad computer that comes with a detachable keyboard, becoming an ARM netbook with the keyboard attached. The SOC is a Nvidia Tegra3, which has 4 cortex A9 cores with NEON , plus a 5th low-power one for idling etc. Quite a different scale from the Raspberry Pi, in cost alas! Still cheaper than any Ultrabook I can find in NZ though.

There a a number of fora that report on various ways to install Linux onto the TF300. The easiest way seems to be to chroot from android into a suitable Linux filesystem image. Most of them mention Ubuntu but claim that any processor-suitable Linux image should work.

Can any guru comment on whether this is likely to work for Puppy? I would tend to be looking at using Android for the things that it is good for and Puppy for the essential Linux apps, especially Libre Office. I was considering the Arch-Puppy approach as a possibility. Or is there another Puppy ARM build that could work?

If it looks possible and I do have a go, would there be anyone available to hold my hand as I try?

Some hope of a useful puppy on a tablet now. I just bought a mfr refurb Acer A1-830 on EBay - they're selling for $89, and they're Intel Atom x86 based. New, they're $150 so I hope we may see a good user base.

I'm hoping the x86 proc will allow Puppy to run. I'm already running Debian on it as a chroot process. You still have to vnc to it (or RDP) and I can't yet do that with a client running on the tablet -- not sure why but local host and 127.0.0.1 haven't been accessible via the stock Android clients I've tried so far.

BUT... I have been able to vnc to the tablet from Puppy's client on my laptop at its network address. So PROGRESS!!

For a taste, here's the Debian desktop running on the Acer Iconia A1-830 tablet. I've added to it and customized the xvkb keyboard. I run this from a VNC connection to the tablet from my laptop running Puppy linux and Rdesktop. I should be able to do this directly on the tablet, but haven't succeeded yet with the Android clients I've tried.

But ideally A linux should run natively -- and that should be possible with this tablet.

Also because this is an x86 tablet, I can install the vast range of .x86 debs, rather than those compiled for ARM devices, and it should be possible to run other types of x86 oriented linux, as well.

Unfortunately they don't actually explain the live install method they used:

Quote:

We're fairly sure you don't need to be told how to install a Linux distro - most now use an identifiable and easy-to-navigate installer - but we thought it would be interesting to see how well they coped, first as a live image, via a bootable USB, then secondly as a fully installed OS.

Well actually, no. At least not for a tablet like this. For Puppy we use a LiveCD or at the very least, extract the puppy files from an ISO add them to a directory and hand write menu.lst stanzas to potint to it (frugal install) None of which is applicable to the tablet. I don't understand the boot process or boot loader -- wish they'd specified this for their article.

Roky, do your atom powered netbooks use a standard bootloader like Grub?

I had never considered an x86 tablet basically because most seemed to run Win 8 and were in the $400 range. I don't have any particular reason to want an ARM processor vs an x86 on a tablet -- just didn't realize an x86 tab was available at an affordable level. X86 has the advantage of years of development, rather than rewriting everything from scratch for a different instruction set.

btw. ARM processors can run a real open source Linux distro now but only those compiled for a particular ARM version and also, typically as an image under Android and VPNed to. The three main available ARM LInii are Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch. Puppy ARM development seemed to stall around 2012 in the threads I've seen. I imagine the biggest damper was the fact that apps would have to be written for ARM, not just the OS. And the variety of ARM version devices would require different compiled versions.

The x86 tablet is suddenly a viable option, however in this price range, in fact the tablet I got has better screen specs at a similar price to the cheapest Ebay Chinese ARM tablet clones. I think we're on the verge of a big change in the tablet market as a result, at least for Linux, -- and I hope we can shortly have a Puppy running on low cost high quality tablets._________________Acer Aspire 5349-2635 laptop dual proc, 4gb ram, frugal Racy 5.5.
1999 Thinkpad 600e hacked Pent 3, overclocked 800 mHz, 490 kb running Lupu 528
Acer Iconia A1-830 x86 tablet -- Puppy some day?